Construction of an introductory guide (as a weblet) to resources on a subject of interest, to be negotiated [the nearest thing to a conventional 'term paper'].
(from On the Study of...)Project: you'll define some topic of particular interest somewhere in the realm of anthropology of East Asia and build a suite of linked web pages as an introductory guide to resources (books, electronic resources, perhaps other media) on the subject, so that others could have a better starting place than what you found to start with. More details soon --for the moment, start thinking about what really interests you. I'm more interested in having you work on something you really care about than in constraining your choices, but what you end up doing will be negotiated with me.
(from Grading, marking, evaluating...)
Think of the Project as a public something that you're constructing for an audience of people who are interested but not particularly knowledgeable about the subject you're researching. You want to teach them, inform them, get them excited about the subject. That requires more than making an electronic scrapbook of illustrations and links to external web pages (though both of those media are likely to be included in your final product). You need to explore the subject yourself, using the whole gamut of resources available to you --which explicitly includes books and journal articles that you find, read, evaluate, and make pointers to (in a consistent bibliographic style).
We'll go through several iterations of project definition and refinement, in the form of communication back and forth between me and thee about what you're interested in. The next phase, which I'll make a specific assignment about very soon, will involve the use of the information-finding tools you've tried and/or seen a bit about (Annie, several periodical databases including JSTOR, Bibliography of Asian Studies, Expanded Academic Index) to explore and retrieve and read and make judgements about stuff relevant to your topic. I want you to get used to using Web pages (your log file and others) to collect and organize and present what you find... and eventually you'll be designing the Project as a separate weblet.
The goal of the Projects is to create guides that are useful, interesting, professional, sophisticated... and that rest upon a substantial amount of investigation and discovery and summarizing that you'll do between now and December. I'll be chivvying you individually and collectively by specific assignments and (eventually) some deadlines for drafts, but I'm also relying on you to (1) choose something that's really interesting to you and (2) keep working on finding out more and putting the results into Web pages. This should be fun and interesting and serious... it's an opportunity to build something that could be of USE to others, which can't be said of the vast majority of term papers.